getting my head around phonebooks on softphones and PBXs

[chrisl2000]

I'm looking to move about 60 users from an old Inter-Tel Axxess system to either FusionPBX or something else relatively free, of course the company directors have seen some demos of things like Gamma Horizon where it's like a poor mans office365 and does contacts (Phone Book) by name with global sync across all devices etc, I'm not necessarily looking for that but something a little ahead of emailing round a CSV for people to import into mobile and desktop softphones would be great (it'd be beyond most of our users and a support nightmare) I see there's a Contacts App in Fusion that must be involved somehow but I don't see how to get the likes of MicroSIP on desktop and Zoiper/Bria on mobile to populate their contacts from it?

How does the Phone Book/Contacts actually work in the FusionPBX world? I've heard the term provisioning but only for Desk Phones so am still a little lost, Thanks!

 

[hfoster]

It does differ for models of phones, or vendors of softphones. Some of them are looking for XMLs in specific formats, others can only do LDAP or Google Contacts, etc.

Yealinks for example get provisioned with strings similar to this:

https://{if isset($http_auth_username)}{$http_auth_username}:{$http_auth_password}@{/if}{$domain_name}/app/provision/?file=directory.xml&contacts=users

When the phone queries that URL, FusionPBX's provision app takes the requested file (directory.xml), looks in the provisioning folder for that model and uses a smarty template to create the phonebook. Here's what the directory.xml template looks like:

https://github.com/fusionpbx/fusion...emplates/provision/yealink/t42s/directory.xml

Thankfully, MicroSIP supports a couple of different formats so in theory you could create a new vendor of phone, stick a directory.xml template in there and test it out. Only problem is I don't think microsip sends any MAC address in the HTTP requests, so the provisioning app might not like it.

Alternatively, the simpler option is to utilise another company resource like a website or internal share folder, or even the FusionPBX server itself (somewhere like app/provision/internal-directory.xml). This does depend on access rights, and how often it changes.

 

[arroinie]

Hi There,
Thanks for your post! We've actually built centralized contact sync into our softphone solution. One of the ways you can do that is by providing a URL that points to the XML file containing a phonebook directory. In FusionPBX, you can install the Remote Phonebook add-on (something like this https://www.pbxforums.com/threads/phonebook-only-supports-yealink-currently.161/), which provides URLs to the XML phonebook directories. These XML directories will be periodically fetched for updates and automatically pulled into softphone apps, so users don't need to created/import contacts manually. I've recorded a short video that demonstrates how it works: